The title of this post is the last line of Chris Haven’s lovely poem, The Songbird’s Song . In the poem, the poet worries that the songbird’s song is disappearing one note at a time.

Eileen is canning tomatoes in the kitchen. I have already been to the Farmers Market. My piano has been fixed and tuned. Kelly Bakker, the piano guy, reacted to the news that I am retiring by trying to sell me a piano.

If he could come up with a Steinway upright I would consider it.

My brother and his wife are coming for a visit next week. I am reorganizing my study to accommodate hosting them.  I moved a metal set of shelves in and put books on it. This would have been a good solution to all the books laying around but the shelf itself is too flimsy. Eileen has bid on a shelf that will replace it. We need to change it so it will be safe for visitors.

I have been reading in David Foster Wallace’s biography.

I’m not sure it’s a great one but learning about his life is interesting and illuminates some of the books he has written that I have read.

I want to finish this bio and the biography of Miles Davis by Szwed.

Szwed has a better handle on Davis than Max does of Wallace.

Since I have finished a couple of novels, I started Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal thurston.

In her essay, “Their Eyes Were Watching God: What does soulful mean?”, Zadie Smith talks about resisting reading this book for several reasons. Her mom convinces her to read it and she is sucked in, despite her objections.

I also am uncomfortable with the dialect in this book. But when she wants to Thurston can write incredibly beautiful prose. Plus she tells a story. I’m hooked.

There There by Tommy Orange is an amazing book. It started slow for me as you can tell if you look at a previous post. But soon I began to see how the entire novel was pointing to a climactic scene that ties everything in the novel cleverly together.

I admit that I am a bit skeptical of writers emerging these days from workshops. But this guy proved to me that not only can he write but he has something to say. I see why it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Each chapter title is a character’s name (with the exception of one called Interlude) One chapter introduces Thomas Frank, “Cheyenne Drummer who formerly worked as a custodian at the Indian Center.” This entire chapter is a tour de force of beauty and pain. It begins with Frank as a sperm and an egg in his parents before they met:

Before you were born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool.—a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were the nested Russian grandmother doll of possibilities in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a thousand different kinds of possibilities, a million heads or tails, flip-shine on a spun coin.”

And so on. By the end of the book I was flipping back and forth and understanding how Organ had carefully prepared the entire story. Wow. What a read!